


and if they are not dead

by squeequeg



Category: Monster (anime or manga)
Genre: Gen, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008, recipient:jan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-22 01:01:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/231913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squeequeg/pseuds/squeequeg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nina receives the first postcard in late August.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and if they are not dead

**Author's Note:**

> (Written under a now-defunct pseud for Yuletide 2008)  
> Many thanks to my fantastic betas, particularly Mrs. Velvet Ears!

Nina receives the first postcard in late August, in the middle of a rainy spell that feels more like March. This morning she overslept and had to run to work, and because of that her umbrella is still sitting by her door. She takes a moment to wring the worst of the water from her hair before checking her mail: two junk flyers, one letter from Dieter stapled to a clipping of his soccer team's picture in the newspaper, a bill meant for her downstairs neighbor . . . and, jammed into the back of the box so that she has to tug it free, a sodden postcard with a French postmark.

It's cheap cardboard, the kind that's sold four to a pack with pre-printed stamps, blank on the side that would usually show a festive picture of Dresden or Dusseldorf or whatever local monument looks good to the tourist board. Only this card isn't blank. The rain's damaged it, but even so, as Nina stands dripping in the hallway of her apartment building, she recognizes the style of the pencil sketch that adorns one side of the card. She'd seen dozens of sketches in the same style, sketches of a pair of twins, a boy and a girl, scattered across the floor in a house outside Ruhenheim. This is a landscape, though; a scrap of a town clinging to the side of a hill. If she hadn't witnessed Franz Bonaparta's death, she'd think this was his work.

But it's not, and only a naive girl (the kind of girl who would receive emails from a secret admirer, who would entertain even for a moment the idea of a prince on a white horse) would think otherwise.

The wind roars down the street outside, turning umbrellas inside out and, probably, blowing open her window three floors up. But Nina doesn't notice. She turns the card over to see a single line of careful block letters, crossed out with a heavy black stroke.

 _  
~~Once upon a time~~   
_

* * *

For the next few days, she keeps looking over her shoulder, expecting to see a familiar face, a mild and menacing smile, as if all the time since Ruhenheim might vanish like a dream. It gets to the point where even her first time working on a legal case (even as a very junior assistant) can't keep her mind off thoughts of her brother.

She doesn't sleep. She barely eats, and when she does the food has no savor.

When Reichwein and Gillen finally come to see her, their bad news is no surprise: Johan is missing from the prison hospital.

"He's been gone for weeks," Reichwein fumes. "The idiots didn't think to notify us -- I only heard because they couldn't get hold of Tenma, and they took their time trying to reach him as it was." No one saw him leave, and no one can explain how a young man just out of a coma could have the energy to walk to the end of the hall, never mind past the guards and out of the hospital. Some of the staff are even having trouble remembering he was there. ("Like a damned phantom," Reichwein grumbles when he thinks she can't hear.) Tenma, they tell her, was visiting earlier in the day, but since he's out of the country they haven't been able to reach him.

Gillen sees her expression and misinterprets it. "He'll be all right," he tells her, clasping her hand. "This is Tenma we're talking about."

Nina nods agreement, but she's not thinking of Tenma, though of all people, she thinks she could show the postcard to him. He might have received one as well -- she shakes her head, confusing Gillen again. She assures them that she'll be all right. They trust her -- why wouldn't they? -- and she sees them both off with a promise to attend Dieter's next soccer game. When they're gone, she slumps against the door, pressing her hands against the back of her neck.

She's located the town of the postmark: Collongues, in southern France, perhaps half a day's drive from a place the place where she found she could not, after all, kill the man who'd killed her parents. She lies awake the night after Reichwein and Gillen leave, although she has work the next morning, and tries to understand why she didn't tell them. When it comes to Johan, her habits of secrecy are well entrenched. Even though she's not running off after her brother this time, her instinct is still to keep it to herself, minimize the possibility of bringing others -- bringing innocents -- into this.

"I can't do this," she says aloud, and the empty air of her flat swallows her words. "I can't leave."

 _I won't leave._ At last she gets up, goes to the window, and waits for morning. It's a long time coming. _I won't leave. If Johan wants to scare me, he'll have to do it in person._

And so she goes on with her work and her life, and reads the news feeds from Collongues, and waits for the first deaths.

* * *

They don't come.

Instead another postcard arrives, a month later. This one shows what looks like a scribbled mess and only slowly resolves into a ruined Greek temple, overgrown with weeds. On the flip side of the card is another single line: _Once upon a time there ~~lived~~ was a boy._

She sets the card down, face up, and notes that her hand is shaking. It should be: what is this if not a promise that Johan is still out there, that he knows where she is and can find her again? What could this be but an oblique threat, of the kind that Johan knows so well?

But it's not. There's nothing of the strange love and menace of Johan's first emails to a student who had forgotten her past, nothing of _I was born to smother you with flowers._

Still, she hides the card at the bottom of her purse, as if to hide her memories away again.

* * *

In November the case Nina's been working on falls through badly. Though an appeal is planned, the decision still hits her like a maul, and her boss takes one look at her and tells her to take a week off. It's her first vacation since she started work, and for a day or two it seems that she's lost the hang of vacation; waking at five and looking around for the day's work only to realize it's not there, always wondering what she needs to take care of next. But after a while, she finds herself sleeping in, staying out later, reconnecting with old friends and remembering that there is a life outside her flat and her office.

On impulse, she joins two of her friends from university on a train to Paris and ends up dancing in a little club till four in the morning with a seventeen-year-old Algerian. He insists that she can't be German because she knows how to dance properly, tells her about his job in a bakery in voluminous detail, and steals a kiss before running off. When her friends offer her fresh-baked bread on the early train home, she can't explain to them why she's laughing so hard.

After a weekend like that, the postcard in her mailbox isn't so much a shock as a stilling hand on the swinging balance of her thoughts. She slides her backpack from her shoulders and touches the edge of the card gingerly, as if it might cut her.

But it won't. _I won't let it._ Nina draws the card out between two fingers, gazes at the sketch -- a fragment of a dome, the calligraphy at its base carefully traced -- then turns it over.

 _Bir varmış, bir yokmuş._

It's a phrase she knows from her work with Turkish immigrants: a traditional way of beginning a story: _Once there was, once there wasn't._ And with the words comes an insight, from a part of her that remembers not roses and thorns but a gentle hand, a quiet voice reading to her.

She remembers the slow poison that permeated Bonaparta's storybooks. Bonaparta had set an exile on himself after those stories had already made their mark, drawn a line of blood across their lives. And she turns the card over and touches the drawing again.

 _Run away,_ Bonaparta had told her, trying to undo what he'd done to her. _As far away as you can._

She takes the postcard upstairs to her flat, then searches for the other two while the kettle heats up. She fills a French press and, while the coffee is brewing, pins all three postcards to the board above her desk, isolated a little apart from the clippings of Dieter's team and the take-out menus. And then, gazing at the three sketches, she unwraps the last of the bread from Paris, pours a cup of coffee, and tips five spoonfuls of sugar into her cup.

The sugar is sweet. The bread is good.

* * *

A flurry of postcards comes one after the other: sketches of an empty marketplace, of a town wrapped around a single mountain peak, of a strange ungainly building that Nina finally identifies as an ancient observatory. _~~Once upon a time.~~_ _~~There was a crooked man.~~_ _~~Long long ago.~~_ Even as the technical skill of the drawings increases, the handwriting on the other side becomes cruder, starker, the letters stabbed nearly through the cards, their lines an unsettling relief beneath the drawings.

On the back of a landscape of minarets: _~~It doesn't matter.~~_

On another, of a fountain crowned by a snarling lion: _~~I lied it does matter.~~_

On a third, a seascape of empty fishing boats: _~~I am not you. You are not me.~~_

None of the pictures show any people, or even animals. It's like he's walking through a world forgotten by life.

On the back of a bleak, windswept landscape, one that she finally identifies as some place called the Taklamakan, the card is so dark with scratched-out marks that she can barely read it, the letters straggling and expanding as if to deny the existence of any emptiness: _Once upon a time there was ~~a prince~~ ~~a king~~ ~~God~~ ~~a martyr~~ ~~a criminal~~ ~~a mirror~~ ~~unwanted~~ ~~wanted~~ ~~a boy~~ ~~a girl~~ ~~a monster with no name~~ ~~a monster with a name~~_

But when she peels back the postal label at the bottom to see where this scream of ink ends, there's only one line.

 _Once upon a time there was me._

* * *

 _Once upon a time a candle burnt itself out_

 _Once upon a time the sun went nova_

 _Once upon a time there was only darkness_

A year passes, week by week, case by case. The postcards come more slowly now, pictures of a Japanese castle, of a single cup of tea left on a flat stone, of dumplings with wisps of steam traced above them, the first hint that there might be any people in this world that Johan sends her. Nina finds her thoughts straying farther from her brother each time. The urge to run either toward or away from him passes more quickly each time, and her life begins to feel less unreal. Now it's the time spent chasing him that feels like a dream, a nightmare long banished by daylight.

She no longer tracks down the source of each card to search for unusual rises in the murder rate.

 _Do you know what happens next?_ Lipsky had asked her about _The God of Peace._ Then, she knew the ending, but this story has an end she can't guess. She can only hope that the end is different. Still, some timorous part of her hopes that even if it ends that way, Johan won't turn the fire that's devouring him onto the world around him, destroying what he can't live with. But that fear recedes, day by day, as her memories of him recede.

And she hopes, and she goes on with her life, sharing tea, cheering at soccer games, missing her alarm at least once a week and running into work late. Tomorrow is a good day, and so is the day after.

 _Once upon a time there was a man without a shadow_

 _Once upon a time there was a man whose shadow saved him_

 _Once upon a time all mirrors broke_

* * *

Tenma comes back to Germany in January, shivering even in his heavy coat. He's only there between assignments for the MSF, barely enough time for him to make it to Dieter's soccer game (Dieter is so happy he nearly gets beaned by a bad kick), but he does meet Nina for dinner. The invitation surprises her until she learns the reason behind it: he's finally gotten word of Johan's escape. And, as always with Tenma, his first worry is for someone else. Their conversation skates over shared memories, skitters around the Red Rose Mansion and Ruhenheim, falls into uncomfortable silences as each tries to gauge what the other knows.

At last he tells her of the few times he's arrived at a village in the middle of nowhere, only to find that one or two of the children already seem to know him. You're the shadow, they tell him, the shadow who saved a life. No, others argue, because you saved a life someone else became your shadow. And when he asks where they heard this, they always shrug and say it's just a story.

"I asked them what other stories they knew," he tells her, hands clasped in front of him, gazing down at the table. "I was scared of what I'd find -- I thought of the games Johan taught the other children, the ways he twisted them . . . But the stories they knew were the same as any other children." He looks up at her, and for a moment she wonders which of the twins he sees. "I don't think he's following me. I don't think it has anything to do with me -- with either of us -- at all."

Nina looks at his hands -- the hands that saved Johan twice over. But they've done more than that. As she has done more than been Johan's sister. "It doesn't," she says at last. Tenma nods, then pauses, his eyes widening. She stands, glances out the door. "Come with me."

She takes him to her flat (Tenma reddens briefly when he realizes that's where they're going, but she ignores it) and shows him the postcards, one by one, the narrative of a journey across the world, seeking something that isn't part of the designs ordained by Bonaparta and Wolf and Capek and the rest. While he reads, she makes coffee, busies herself at the minimal stove that is all that her flat offers for a kitchen. "I remember what it was like before -- before I turned twenty," she says. "I had forgotten Johan existed, forgotten who I used to be . . . I think he's looking for a way that he can forget Johan existed as well." She touches the side of the French press, feels the heat begin to burn, draws away. "I met so many people who were murderers, who had done awful things . . . so many of them tried to fix it later, to make it all better. I think he knows he can't just repent. Not here, not as Johan."

Tenma doesn't answer. When she turns, he's turned the cards over to expose the dozens of aborted beginnings, arranged them in rows. There are tears in his eyes, and she knows he's thinking of the murderers he knew, and the possibilities of redemption. Slowly, as if recounting a dream, he tells her of what he saw the day that Johan left the hospital, of a question asked but unanswered in that hospital room: When the twins' mother had to give one up to the Red Rose Mansion, which did she intend to keep?

 _It doesn't matter. I lied it does matter._ Not about her forgiveness after all. Or at least, not entirely.

"He wanted to know," he says, "whether he was the wanted one, or the unwanted. I couldn't answer -- I thought I was dreaming."

Nina comes to stand beside him. "That's not a question that has any meaning," she says at last, and he nods, wiping at his eyes. She puts a hand on his shoulder, then, carefully, cradles his head against her breast. He draws a sudden intake of breath, then lets it out slow, shivering. Nina strokes his hair and gazes out the window, into the winter starlight.

* * *

It's not till six months later that the last postcard arrives. High summer now, and the air outside her flat smells of hot stone and dust, and Nina takes her weekend afternoons slowly, working in the cool mornings and evenings. When night falls she ventures down to street level to find her mailbox full: a stiff envelope packed with photographs from Lotte and Karl's vacation, a bill for her scooter repair, a letter from Tenma, hesitant and slow, out of the habit of writing letters. And a last postcard, more battered than the others, as if the postman had dropped it in several puddles on the way, or perhaps it suffered that damage before it ever reached a postbox. The postmark's too smudged to read, and whatever identifying traces were on the front of the card have been reduced to scratches and blots of green ink. No drawing, Nina thinks, tracing her fingers over it; maybe the remnants of a photograph, or a commercial postcard, even. But time and travel have worn away what once was written there.

On the back of the card is a drawing: a harbor, lined with fishing boats, piers stretching out into the water. There's a hint of color in the sky, sunrise or sunset, and a haze of buildings on the far side of the bay.

At the very edge, traced so lightly that it's almost invisible, is the figure of a man sitting on the edge of a pier. It's awkwardly drawn by an artist unused to depicting people, but there's a sense that he's looking out over his shoulder, away from her, towards the water.

Below the drawing are two lines of text, and Nina's eyes prickle as she reads them. "I'm glad you're home," she whispers.

 _Once upon time there lived a brother and a sister._

 _And if they are not dead, why then, they are living still._

  



End file.
